PRG Breaks Guinness World Record for the Largest Continuous LED Screen at MDLBEAST Soundstorm 2024

MDLBEAST SOUNDSTORM returned for another dramatic year in the Saudi desert with PRG supplying a record-breaking video package for the event totalling over 4800m² of LED panels. The project was a huge collaboration of PRG’s global offices, including the UK, Germany, Belgium, UAE and North America, working together with MDLBEAST and designers Heather Shaw and Vitae Motus.

The full package included INFILED TITAN X on the main wings and canopy along with INFILED ATLAS X panels for the upstage risers. The total continuous screen stood an impressive 34.6m high by 165m wide, creating a stunning backdrop for acts throughout the weekend, including Eminem and Linkin Park.

To construct such a screen on this scale provided significant engineering challenges, the designer specified “hidden” rigging, so PRG Germany’s rigging team, led by John Van Look, designed and built an entire system of diverter rigging to keep the hoists on the ground for a minimal rigging profile along the top of the screen against the desert skyline.

Each 54m wing was lifted as a single section on 90 hoists with a finished weight of 72 tonnes.

The PRG LED team, led by Alastair MacDiarmid, spent several months in consultation with the original design engineers for the TitanX screen. Together, they performed detailed re-analysis of the structure to define the strict parameters within which the screen could be safely built to the extra height and fulfil the design brief.

Further challenges were presented by the extremes of temperature in the high desert and thermal expansion of the structure with temperature swings of up to 30°C between day and night. Once those calculations were signed off the deployment task was handed over to the PRG Rigging Team under the instruction of Van Look who also produced an exceptionally accurate rigging plan.  This meant that when the screen met in the middle after nearly a month of building work, the two sides matched perfectly both vertically and horizontally.

The screen curved around into the stage performance area and a 280m² - 40tonne upstage section lifted 8m into the air for stage access during changeovers. PRG used it’s Movecat digital hoist control system to lift the upstage screen in a custom built vertical track, keeping the lifting screen precisely in position, for both safety and aesthetic reasons, giving a seamless join to the side screen for one big canvas.

For precise and flexible control of the 15 UHD canvas space, the screen management and playback system included 16 Disguise VX4 media servers, 14 Barco E2 Gen2 and 6 Resolume media servers. 42 Novastar MX40s configured with full redundancy handled processing for the LED, with the whole system running at minimal latency. In total, over 40 racks of equipment were deployed on site.

The other stats continue to impress, with 4 kilometres of fibre optic cable covering the media servers and camera systems with a further 5 kilometres used for LED processing, covering the 120 and 220 active fibre cores respectively. Overall, over 86 million pixels were processed on the continuous screen, all whilst ensuring capacity was available within the system to drive a variety of DJ riser screens throughout the course of the festival. 

The team also ensured the on-site experience was seamless for guest artists, incorporating aspects of the systems previously used at major UK festivals, such as Creamfields and Radio 1 Big Weekend, to allow guest VJs access to the workflow and accuracy they expect on a PRG show. A full pre visualisation suite was built backstage, as well as a supplementary visualiser system at FOH, allowing artist teams to pre-program and verify their mapping, right until the artist goes on stage. 

“We called upon our years of festival experience to create a strong, reliable backbone for the system, with seamless experience for artist teams at the forefront of our system design. Our design ensured that artist requirements could be catered for, and allowed for easy integration of artist own equipment, no matter how simple, or how complex.“ said Jordan McMahon, Video Technical Specialist, PRG Events Services Team.

“Of course, this unique project required some exceptional engineering to manage signal precisely across such a huge canvas, but after careful planning we managed to deliver a strong, low-latency solution, with maximum redundancy and flexibility.“

Before heading out to the Saudi desert, the team prepped and tested the whole video control system in PRG’s dedicated rehearsal space THE BRIDGE, which proved to be an invaluable space. During the week-long system prep, the team laid out and built the entire system, replicating how it would be positioned on-site. Utilising THE BRIDGE meant the team had dedicated space big enough to configure and fully test the system, ensuring that it would be repeatable on-site, before heading on site and attempting the high stakes world record. 

“THE BRIDGE was a fantastic resource to have available to us during prep. Having our own area, with power and plenty of space to work, was instrumental in allowing us to carry out the level of preparation and testing required for such a complex project.“ McMahon continued.“When we arrived on site, we were confident that we were arriving with a proven system, leading to minimal troubleshooting required on the build.“

“We’re so proud to have achieved the Guiness World Record with the video screen this year” said Yvonne Donnelly Smith, Sales Director for Music. “We’ve worked with the MDLBEAST team for many years now and it keeps getting better and better. It was a fantastic challenge for us to put our innovation and team to the test and what we’ve achieved is outstanding.”